Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [56]
I tried to look at the situation objectively – I’d failed Selection only a third of the way through the course – what chance did I really have of passing if I tried again?
My family said that maybe it wasn’t meant to be, and that I had gained an invaluable experience from it. This just made me feel worse.
Yet through it all, a little part of me, deep down, believed that I could do this – that I was capable of passing. It wasn’t a big part of me, but it was an ember.
Sometimes an ember is all we need.
CHAPTER 50
Our achievements are generally limited only by the beliefs we impose on ourselves.
If we tell ourselves often enough that we don’t have what it takes, then that will inevitably become our reality.
But I also knew if I could somehow replace my doubt with hope, my fear with courage, and my self-pity with a sense of pride, then I just might be able to do this.
It would involve paying a huge price in sweat and hard graft; it would involve having to train longer and harder than ever before.
And the mind would have to drive it all.
It was a decision I had already made years earlier.
Ed Amies, one of my oldest and closest friends, told me simply that: ‘So often, God’s callings have a birth, a death and then a resurrection.’
I had had the birth, and had got stuck in to Selection; I had had the death, at that fateful dam in the Welsh mountains – now was a logical time for the resurrection.
If my faith stood for anything it was this: miracles really can happen.
So I made the decision to try again.
This time, though, I would be doing this alone.
I knew that support from my family and friends would be much less forthcoming, especially from Mum, who could see the physical toll that just four months had taken.
But I felt deadly serious about passing this properly, now, and I somehow knew that it was my last chance to do it.
And no one was going to do it for me.
Some two weeks later I listened to a mumbled message on my answerphone from Trucker.
He’d got lost on the final part of a march. After hours of wandering aimlessly in the dark, and out of time, he had finally been found by a DS in a Land Rover, out to look for stray recruits.
Trucker was dejected and tired. He, too, had failed the course.
He went through the same struggle over the next few weeks that I had, and like me, he was invited by the squadron to try again. We were the only two guys to have been asked back.
With greater resolve than ever, we both threw ourselves into training with an intensity that we had never done before. This time we meant business.
We both moved into an old, secluded, rented, farm cottage some six miles out of Bristol. And, Rocky-style, we started to train.
The next Selection course (of which two are run annually) was just about to start. And just like in Groundhog Day, we found ourselves back in that old dusty gymnasium at the squadron barracks, being run ragged by the DS.
There was another whole bunch of hopefuls. They would diminish down at a startling rate. We had seen it happen before.
This time, though, we were there as the ‘old hands’. And it helped.
We knew what to expect; the mystique had gone, and the prize was up for grabs.
That was empowering.
It was now wintertime, and winter Selection is always considered the tougher course, because of the mountain conditions. I tried not to think about this.
Instead of the blistering heat, and midges, our enemies would be the freezing, driving sleet, the high winds and the short daylight hours.
These made Trucker and me look back on the summer Selection days as quite balmy and pleasant! It is strange how accustomed you become to hardship, and how what once seemed horrific can soon become mundane.
The DS had often told us: ‘If it ain’t raining, it ain’t training.’
And it rains a lot in the Brecon Beacons. Trust me.
(I recently overheard our middle boy, Marmaduke, tell one of his friends this SAS mantra. The other child was complaining that he couldn’t go outside because it was raining. Marmaduke, aged four, put